Malpractice litigation wrongly blamed for inconsistent healthcare
Managed Care Weekly Digest
August 8, 2005

Conventional wisdom holds that malpractice lawsuits are the bane of modern medicine, with high insurance premiums driving doctors from the profession and the threat of lawsuits discouraging healthcare employees from reporting and correcting medical mistakes.

Examining these claims in a lengthy article in the Cornell Law Review and a shorter article in Regulation, a University of Illinois health-law scholar found most of the assertions to be without factual basis.

"Healthcare is substantially more dangerous than it should be," David A. Hyman, Illinois professor of law and of medicine, concluded in articles cowritten with Charles Silver, a law professor at the University of Texas. But malpractice litigation has little to do with the continuing failure of medical providers to deal effectively with the erratic quality of healthcare.

"In the United States, it is true both that one can obtain the best available care for most maladies and that healthcare errors are the eighth leading cause of death, ranking ahead of AIDS, motor vehicle accidents and breast cancer," Hyman and Silver wrote. For example, hospital-acquired infections are so common that one estimate indicates that proper hand washing by healthcare workers alone would save 20,000 lives a year.

In addition, according to the articles, healthcare providers "routinely omit indicated procedures of known value, frequently perform treatments that are unnecessary and inefficacious, and employ practice patterns that vary widely and for no good reason. Adverse drug events are distressingly common. Tens of billions of dollars are spent annually on medical services whose value is questionable or nonexistent."

For a copy of the complete article, contact CJRG.